Wednesday, April 29, 2015

Smash Capitalist Imperialism and Stop its Drive to a Third World War!

May Day: Workers of the World Unite!

The world is in the throes of a crisis of overproduction of capital caused by the falling rate of profit. It is exacerbated by the rise of China and Russia as rival imperialist powers to the declining US led bloc. We regard the crisis as proof of the self-destruction of capitalism in its death throes. It can only get worse as it destroys masses of accumulated capital and drives down the costs of labor which in past crises has always led to imperialist wars.

Today the severity of the crisis is compounded by the fast approaching capitalist-fuelled climate catastrophe and the end of the human species. This crisis can only end in the destruction of a Third World War and climate catastrophe, or as the World Socialist Revolution. To stop the drive to imperialist war, ecological collapse and the end of humanity, imperialism must die!

Imperialism’s war on workers

For imperialism to survive it must make the masses pay for its crisis. This means attacking their livelihood and their lives! This is shown by the huge downward pressure on the masses living standards and attacks on their rights, their historic gains, and their very existence. It takes many forms:

(a) An expanding reserve army of unemployed from Asia, Africa and Latin America where most of the working population is in the black economy. Everywhere casualising contracts such as zero hours are targeting especially black, female and young low-paid or no-paid workers. In Europe and the US today up to half of youth are unemployed.

(b) Attacks on indigenous peoples’ struggles to survive and defend their natural resources from outright theft and plunder as we see from the Amazon to Australia, from the Zimbabwe diamond mines to the West Papuan independence struggle and the US First Nation peoples’ stands against fracking and capitalist climate catastrophe.

(c) Rising flows of migrant workers denied basic rights to life as in the case of African migrants deported by the ANC from South Africa, dying by the thousands trying to reach Europe, and trapped in concentration camps in Australia, Greece and France. And the millions of political refugees fleeing invasions and wars.

(d) Attacks on trade unions to break them so that workers are super-exploited and killed in unsafe conditions as in Bangladesh and Argentina; attacks by the bureaucratic thugs of the state, killer cops on the union ranks everywhere such as miners of Las Heras, Argentina, and Bolivia, and the massacre at Marikana.

(e) Vicious austerity measures imposed everywhere that destroy state welfare support for the working class in health, education, housing and social benefits driving workers into poverty ridden slums, early death or suicide as in the UK and Greece, driving down wages and restoring 19th century labour conditions.

(f) Rising fascist movements among petty bourgeois and lumpen elements that ferment divisions in the working class over jobs, housing, etc., that lead to ethnic, religious, xenophobic attacks in Europe and elsewhere which prepare the masses as cannon fodder countless proxy wars from South Sudan to Ukraine.

(g) Imperialist invasions and occupations leading to proxy wars that pit workers of one or other nation, nationality, ethnicity or religion, and gender to fight one another. The proxy wars are most extreme in Africa (South Sudan) MENA (Syria, Iraq, Yemen) and Eurasia (Ukraine). They prepare the road to the Third World War.

By driving the proletariat into poverty and dividing it against itself as hostile factions, and in numerous wars, the imperialists and their national bourgeois agents desperately force down the costs of labour in the hope of restoring their profits. But so far they have not succeeded. The resistance is kicking back everywhere.

The proletariat fights to survive

For the international proletariat, the way out of the crisis is to resist all the imperialist attacks on every front in every country and build a revolutionary communist international to overthrow the rotten capitalist imperialist system. There is no lack of will and capacity to fightback by the world’s workers. Every day makes thousands martyrs of our class.

We can see the spontaneous resistance taking many forms in the struggle for jobs, social and economic rights and the defence of basic human rights, from opposition to cop killers from Ferguson to Baltimore, from the fascists in the Donbas, from the dictator al Assad and Islamic State in Aleppo, from ANC police thugs in Marikana, and from popular front betrayals in Brazil, South Africa and Greece.

Yet, inevitably – whether this resistance is in the form of the fight against austerity, casualisation, for the rights of indigenous, blacks, women, of migrant workers, for the rights of unions, and opposition to proxy wars, invasions and occupations – spontaneous resistance is everywhere trapped by the false friends of the working class; the labour bureaucracy in the unions, the reformist left parties, and most treacherously the self-proclaimed communists and fake Trotskyists who betray the proletariat by covering for the open agents of the bourgeoisie in the ranks of the working class itself.

To mobilise and organise a united world proletariat, first the working class must be freed from its treacherous bureaucratic misleaders who suck militant workers into fatal political alliances with the bourgeoisie under the banner of the popular front (from the ANC in South Africa, the PT in Brazil, the PSUV in Venezuela, to Syriza in Greece) that ties their hands as the crisis deepens and the fascist gangs and paramilitaries are unleashed by the bosses to try to smash the international revolutionary proletariat and stop it carrying out its historic task of overthrowing the capitalist system.

For a revolutionary program and party!

To bring an end to the capitalist imperialist crisis which now threatens the destruction of humanity and nature we need a socialist revolution. That needs a revolutionary transitional program of demands that are raised to meet the immediate urgent needs of workers for jobs, housing, education, health, etc., fought for by workers, for the workers.

These fights bring workers up against the power of the bosses state and its repressive forces, that denies migrants rights, kills militant workers, bans unions, jails or kills protesters, and incites workers to kill one another in pogroms and wars. This proves the need for workers to build their own class power based upon their organs independent of the bureaucracy and bourgeoisie - councils, militias, and most of all an international Leninist/Trotskyist party that provides the leadership to the revolutionary proletariat.

The revolutionary party has to be everywhere that workers are resisting the crisis, challenging all the bosses’ agents at every point, and helping to organise workers into their own organs of workers power and breaking out of the popular front with the bourgeoisie.

Our aim must be to name, expose and kick all these class traitors out of the class and to create a new leadership of class fighters who are won to the program of permanent revolution, capable of turning strike action into political general strikes, and then into victorious insurrections to overthrow the capitalist state and impose a Government of the workers and all the oppressed!

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red rave is the loud mouth of members of the Communist Workers' Group of Aotearoa/New Zealand, committed to building a new communist international to lead workers to the revolutionary overthrow of global capitalism. Since 2010 we have been in a Liaison Committee with the Communist Workers' Group (USA), the Revolutionary Workers' Group (Zimbabwe) and the Revolutionary Workers' Group (Brazil).